Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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I'll be honest. Talking to an average SF Walgreens pharmacist or SF government employee seems to be very much like the way people operate GPT-3. You have to use the correct prompt engineering and you'll get the right results. I've gotten results with bad initial conditions by correctly prompt-engineering them. I've watched other people have trouble (and rarely) have faced trouble myself by providing the same information without the right prompt-engineering[0].

So, in some sense, maybe it's almost there. It's just that right now, it can only produce short-memory text output. But lots of people are only capable of that[1].

0: For instance, a classic technique is the "I'm a dumbass but nice". Your pharmacist cocked up your prescription - maybe forgot a refill? Bad method: "I think it's supposed to be X and have a refill". Good method: "Oh, I'm sorry. Do you know if the doc put a refill notice on the prescription at the bottom? He said he'd do it but maybe I forgot to remind him". I've watched me win while others lose. Smiles while others get yelled at. This is an easy one. Everyone knows this. But there's better ones too.

1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus...

P.S. VT7L3TAb

Pharmacists are bound by clear rules and regulations which dictate what drugs they can dispense and when. It has little to do with your "prompt engineering" and more to do with whether your doctor actually filed the prescription correctly.

Haha, you'd think but they get it wrong often and they'll bend things for you. It's why I can pick up other people's prescriptions for controlled substances with nothing but my ID at pharmacies I've never been to before, why I've transformed a no-refill into a refill (they just read it wrong) while another person had to call the doctor for the same outcome, etc.

People everywhere are not really bound by anything. They will bend anything for me. Even immigration. In the past I even flew through a place where I needed (back then) a transit visa I didn't have with a passport damaged beyond identification.

Are you Doctor WHO?

Sadly, the one time I failed at this was when I tried to convince the Met I was, and they confiscated my TARDIS because I was trying to be manipulative ;)

So a pharmacist is more like Microsoft Access than GPT-3 ?

A little off-topic, but the "nice idiot" routine definitely works: Admit you are possibly in the wrong, but still would like whatever it is you need. Even if you don't immediately receive what you want, doing this a few times in a fixed location (like an apothecary) will quickly give you good rapport with all the folks that work there. After that point you can be certain folks will try to help you a bit more proactively than they otherwise might.

I went to sleep last night, knowing that I would get a certain kind of misunderstanding of my comment, hence that last hash there. It's a pastebin URL (gives it a timestamp) https://pastebin.com/VT7L3TAb so you can compare it with the outcome condition and look at the timestamps.

That pastebin URL contains `65f7cae61536f9e4967ade278f77273daeff36a0f998853a7c9d7264bd4a9f4d`. A child comment[0] (since flagged) to this thread describes me one hour later:

> He's a narcissistic clown. He is fond of posting dehumanizing and insipid drivel, like the top-level comment here which denies the sentience of the wage slaves that serve him.

I pre-committed my answer to this reply before it was posted because I knew it would come: (verify using the hash and timestamp)

    echo "Ah, you're offended. But don't worry. I am not above being prompt-engineered too. That's the point" | sha256sum

    65f7cae61536f9e4967ade278f77273daeff36a0f998853a7c9d7264bd4a9f4d  -

In some sense this conversation chain (my original comment included) is a purely probabilistic output that one could mechanistically have created from sheer experience. So perhaps the transformers aren't as far from us as we think.

I actually knew that the other comments would also arrive and how I would respond, in general. It's rude to pre-commit to answers, though, so I could only safely do that to a guy who would be rude to me. The guy pulling my leg about Dr. Who did buck the chain (you bastard, ruining the point). I think we all have a degree of that. If you see "Google" and "service", you know the top comment "I won't ever use Google because they sunset Reader" or some such shit. These transformer AIs are rapidly approaching the level of HN-like social networks (like me and my comments) - and low-repetition interactions (like the above-mentioned pharmacists). The key thing is that they can't currently track specific state-alteration, i.e. they do not know this apple was moved from this side of the table to the other, but that's a sensory problem. We'll see.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31722264

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